Yes, the title of this posting is an odd juxtaposition. On Friday a ferocious ransomware attack crippled thousands of computer networks around the world, including Britain's National Health System. So, what does this cyber-blitz -- long predicted in sci fi -- have to do with California's spectacularly successful, popular and effective governor?
It's simple. There are matters - like cyber security - in which we cannot wait for the natural election cycles to replace bad leadership. Someone is going to have to step up and speak for us, and I suspect we'll see nothing useful out of Washington, for quite some time.
First though, some good news. While the U.S. federal admministration thrashes and flails in a state of near-collapse, we need to remember our strengths:
1) Civil servants and other professionals continue to do their jobs. Ranging from the FBI and Intelligence Community to energy researchers to diplomats to scientists, teachers, journalists and military officers - our skilled women and men out there are coming to terms with the real lesson of the Comey Affair... that the president can only fire or bully so many people. In fact, that bolt is largely shot. If he tries going on a "you're fired" rampage, Donald Trump must know that John McCain and other GOP adults will reach their fed-up limit. At which point they will lead a counter-attack against him. Anyway - as Comey is realizing - being fired by Donald Trump is likely to open career opportunities for the victim, not close them.
Yes, the Confederacy has achieved a major Putin-Koch objective, just by throwing grit in the machinery. Trump pleases his masters, even if all he can accomplish is slamming the U.S. federal government down to grinding first gear. Make no mistake, we're being harmed.
2) But there are other strengths to our federal system. In fact, much of the damage can be bypassed.
No, I'm not talking about Congress, or even the Supreme Court... though a day will come when three men -- Roberts, Alito and Gorsuch -- will have to choose between loyalty to a gone-insane conservative movement and faithfulness to the great enlightenment experiment that is America. But we aren't there yet, and there is no telling whether they will pass that test. (I would bet against it.)
No, the hidden strength I am talking about is federalism. The fact that states have a great deal of power and potential, even in this modern age. And to make this clear, let me tell you about something called the Uniform Business Code.
== Treaties Among (semi) Sovereign States ==
Commencing during the Second World War, state governments sent experts to conferences where they negotiated a number of uniform acts that 'harmonize the law of sales and other commercial transactions across the U.S.' This meant that businesses and individuals could compete or cooperate, buy-and-sell, with confidence across state lines.
Over the decades since, adjustments have been worked out so calmly and effectively that most members of the public aren't even aware of the UBC. We learn in school that the federal government has laid its meddlesome hand down, through the "commerce clause" of the Constitution. But in fact, the UBC is more pervasive. It is applied to far more matters than federal environmental, safety and other regulations, every day. Moreover, it is just one of many joint projects of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) and the American Law Institute (ALI).
Nor are uniform codes the only way in which U.S. states act to bypass Washington. I am far from an expert on this (and any mavens are welcome to weigh in below, under comments.) But such inter-state accords range from water rights to joint hydroelectric and transportation projects all the way to recent agreements about marijuana deregulation rules. And while these endeavors do have to take into account acts of Congress, they have often been used to bypass the gridlock of Washington.
The education reform known as Common Core was likewise negotiated among states and not - as commonly assumed - imposed by Washington. This consensus among states, calling upon all school systems to meet minimum standards, was originally a conservative idea, till that movement was hijacked.
(An aside: I also think states should be more bold about doing experiments that are different and not uniform. Colorado and Oregon led the way out of our stupid Marijuana War. There are countless other experiments that could be parceled out to states, as 'laboratories of democracy.')
Alas, such pragmatic treaties used to happen more often, back in those halcyon days when the Conference of Governors was a working group of 50 adults, instead of a conclave of posturing-partisan prima donnas. Today, the divide among states could not be more sharp. And not just as a matter of 'left-vs.-right dogma, but far more about competence versus incompetence and sane versus insane.
Take actual outcomes. Despite a few outliers, like Texas and Utah, most states that have deep-red governments -- governor and legislature -- have had gruesomely awful results, the last few decades. Those doing best among them, like Virginia and North Carolina, have been turning purple, fast. Those doing worst -- including the deep Confederate South and Kansas and Oklahoma -- are sinking fast. Meanwhile, pure-blue states along the coasts appear to be doing great, and not only where it comes to budget balancing and investing in people. Any libertarian-leaning person is a hypocrite, if he or she fails to notice which states are finally backing out of the loony-catastrophic so-called War on Drugs.
Which brings us full circle back the California's Governor Jerry Brown, whose fourth tenure in Sacramento is so successful, we all would have plotzed to have him be the Democratic Party nominee for President, in 2016, despite his age.
But okay, that's done. So why do I call him "president in exile"?
== Put it all together ==
We must face a harsh truth. We are currently in phase eight of the Civil War, a recurring national fever that has broken out in America ever since 1778. Washington is in confederate hands and -- as usual -- the Union is late responding, slow to anger and at a loss where to find its generals.
Well, until we can locate our ideal combination of Lincoln and T. Roosevelt and F. Roosevelt and Ike, we'll have to make do. And right now, blatantly, by every metric of population, success and delighted citizenry, there is one leader of Blue America, if only he would stand up to take the position he has earned.
Jerry Brown is -- de facto -- president in exile of what remains of the United States of America. Moreover, it is time to slap him into realizing it.
Is the U.S. federal government being deliberately frozen and rendered impotent by (at best) fools or else (at-worst) traitors? Sure. Shall we just march and scream and tell jokes on late-night TV? Or might we use tools that are already in place?
Oh, sure, Jerry Brown cannot call an emergency meeting of the National Governor's Conference. A majority of the attendees would be Republican dogmatists who seem bent on dragging their states down a toilet swirl of cheating and failed ideology. There is a Democratic Governors Association -- a small group, chaired by CT Gov. Dan Malloy -- and it would be a start.
Sure, there are plenty of pragmatic matters generally on the agenda, when the governors of active, and not confederate, states meet. But I assert it is time for more than that. It's time for this group to make plain that they intend to provide a nucleus for action on behalf of the American Experiment. And yes -- if need be -- in that noble endeavor's defense.
Example #1 - the Affordable Care Act is not dead, yet. Nor would the House bill kill it completely. Blue States can step in, on a dozen issues. Foremost among these: All it will take to "save the ACA insurance markets" will be for these states to impose their own individual mandate penalty tax on young people who shirk buying insurance. Sure it's risky. But blue state youths are very solidly democratic. And if they were to join the insurance pool in large numbers, state-centered versions of the ACA won't "explode" as Trump raves that he wants them to. At least not in those states. And the contrast with places like Kansas will soar beyond anyone's ability to ignore.
But that's not today's main point. As I said at the beginning, what makes all this critical is a matter of safety and security.
Which brings us back to Friday's massive cyber attack. What can a dozen governors do about what is clearly a national and international problem?
Well, these blue states combined have the world's fourth biggest economy. They hold the world's greatest universities and research institutions and the most tech savvy populace. They provide most of the tax revenue that the rest of America utterly relies upon, as well as nearly all of the productivity and inventiveness. A point that could be made very clear if Jerry Brown went on TV and did the job that Donald Trump is supposedly there to do.
== Tell us to get clean! ==
Talk to computer security experts and they will tell you that most of our vulnerability today comes from both citizens and companies being lax about updating their security software. Millions of home and office computers are now suborned into participating in "botnets" or networks of surreptitiously connected machines, that criminals or foreign governments then use to transmit and amplify their attacks. For whatever the reason -- generally laziness -- those corporations and individual users cannot be bothered to do simple things that would prevent their machines from being taken over.
In legal terms, that is negligent-complicit participation in crime. And it is a cancer in our society, as we saw, last Friday. Moreover, the solution is obvious! Someone we trust - who has some authority - needs to go online and on TV to say:
"Those of you out there who have negligently allowed your computers to become hackable have opened opportunities for criminals and parasites to prey on others, and upon your communities, states and nation. I am not here to propose making that negligence a criminal offense. But I will now warn you that you can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse. Moreover, I am asking that state legislatures pass the following amendment to tort or civil law.
"If you take basic precautions, annually, to maintain your system's security updates and use any of a dozen state-measured, commercial anti-hacking programs, then that good faith effort will be enough to leave private individuals and most small businesses non-culpable for damages from future botnet attacks, even if their systems wind up being used in clever hacks that the security companies missed. Moreover, here are links to videos that will explain it all, and your options.
"But if you have not done basic security updates, and your system is used to infect others, then you will bear a proportionate share of the damages that eventually are awarded to victims of such crimes. Moreover, this responsibility will apply to any interests that out-of-state parties have in California, or any other member of our group of states."
There you have it. Just three paragraphs. And I promise you, the very next day millions of lazy people and companies would rush to update their systems and to run security programs! Within a week, many if not most of the botnets operating in America would be severely undermined, if not crippled. And tens of millions of Americans will be safer, by the way.
Why am I combining two topics today, by asking Jerry Brown to make this public statement? Isn't this a matter for the President of the United States, or some other high, national official?
Think about that question and answer it for yourself.
It's not just that we have a sabotaged and crippled national government, at-best incompetent and at-worst treasonous. It is that this matter cannot wait!
And yes, okay, I would also love to see Jerry do something nationally memorable. There is even a chance that Blue America -- which now includes every single fact-using profession -- might rally around him as an elder statesman who has no ambitions for 2020.
Well, well. It's a fantasy. Like the dream that was America. Like the palpably successful dream called California.
== Jerry's Evil Conterpart ==
That should suffice for today. But before we close, a note about someone who is just as smart... in service of evil.
Do I still call George F. Will "The Worst Man in America," when he applies his sharp pen to eviscerating Donald Trump? In this case, his diagnosis is acid:
"This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence."
Given how much I agree with Will's assessment of DT, might I retract my own aspersions aimed at George Will?
Consider them doubled. This brilliant wit dedicated his adult life to undermining the equally brilliant clades - from science and medicine to investigative journalism - that engendered most of our wealth, achievements and power. His rationalizations helped fuel the War on Science, now being waged against every fact-based profession. His scalpel pierced deepest, in the steady lobotomization of American conservatism.
In denouncing Trump, Mr. Will expresses outrage that an impudent upstart leapt into the saddle of confederate, anti-intellectual populism -- a rabid, frothing beast that the lords of the right thought to be their private steed... just as the Junkers Prussian nobility were appalled when a raving rider seized the reins of 1930s German rightwing populism. In both cases, the first victim was sensible, rational conservatism. The version of conservatism that Mr. Will claims to represent, but that he has systematically assassinated.
George Will's unctuous pleadings for oligarchy - and excuses for wealth disparity rivaling 1789 France - persuaded many of today's aristocratic morons to believe what their egos and sycophants told them. Despite history's lesson, they think that this time they'll do neo-feudalism right, by pounding the great American middle class that the Greatest Generation built, and by inciting populist rage against all the fact-using, "smartaleck elites" who stand in oligarchy's way.
Of course the only possible outcome from this lunatic-stupid oligarchic putsch is that they will wind up riding tumbrels.
Wait... is it possible that was George Will's intent, all along? As in that famous Tom Tomorrow cartoon? I never said he wasn't clever!
But no. This is why he is the Worst Man in America. Instinct nor reflex nor dullard rationalization made him do all this. He brought us here with open eyes. And now, his horrified denunciations of Trump are like Viktor Frankenstein screaming at his monster.
You did this. Deal with that fact. Then maybe we'll listen.
It's simple. There are matters - like cyber security - in which we cannot wait for the natural election cycles to replace bad leadership. Someone is going to have to step up and speak for us, and I suspect we'll see nothing useful out of Washington, for quite some time.
First though, some good news. While the U.S. federal admministration thrashes and flails in a state of near-collapse, we need to remember our strengths:
1) Civil servants and other professionals continue to do their jobs. Ranging from the FBI and Intelligence Community to energy researchers to diplomats to scientists, teachers, journalists and military officers - our skilled women and men out there are coming to terms with the real lesson of the Comey Affair... that the president can only fire or bully so many people. In fact, that bolt is largely shot. If he tries going on a "you're fired" rampage, Donald Trump must know that John McCain and other GOP adults will reach their fed-up limit. At which point they will lead a counter-attack against him. Anyway - as Comey is realizing - being fired by Donald Trump is likely to open career opportunities for the victim, not close them.
Yes, the Confederacy has achieved a major Putin-Koch objective, just by throwing grit in the machinery. Trump pleases his masters, even if all he can accomplish is slamming the U.S. federal government down to grinding first gear. Make no mistake, we're being harmed.
2) But there are other strengths to our federal system. In fact, much of the damage can be bypassed.
No, I'm not talking about Congress, or even the Supreme Court... though a day will come when three men -- Roberts, Alito and Gorsuch -- will have to choose between loyalty to a gone-insane conservative movement and faithfulness to the great enlightenment experiment that is America. But we aren't there yet, and there is no telling whether they will pass that test. (I would bet against it.)
No, the hidden strength I am talking about is federalism. The fact that states have a great deal of power and potential, even in this modern age. And to make this clear, let me tell you about something called the Uniform Business Code.
== Treaties Among (semi) Sovereign States ==
Commencing during the Second World War, state governments sent experts to conferences where they negotiated a number of uniform acts that 'harmonize the law of sales and other commercial transactions across the U.S.' This meant that businesses and individuals could compete or cooperate, buy-and-sell, with confidence across state lines.
Over the decades since, adjustments have been worked out so calmly and effectively that most members of the public aren't even aware of the UBC. We learn in school that the federal government has laid its meddlesome hand down, through the "commerce clause" of the Constitution. But in fact, the UBC is more pervasive. It is applied to far more matters than federal environmental, safety and other regulations, every day. Moreover, it is just one of many joint projects of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) and the American Law Institute (ALI). Nor are uniform codes the only way in which U.S. states act to bypass Washington. I am far from an expert on this (and any mavens are welcome to weigh in below, under comments.) But such inter-state accords range from water rights to joint hydroelectric and transportation projects all the way to recent agreements about marijuana deregulation rules. And while these endeavors do have to take into account acts of Congress, they have often been used to bypass the gridlock of Washington.
The education reform known as Common Core was likewise negotiated among states and not - as commonly assumed - imposed by Washington. This consensus among states, calling upon all school systems to meet minimum standards, was originally a conservative idea, till that movement was hijacked.
(An aside: I also think states should be more bold about doing experiments that are different and not uniform. Colorado and Oregon led the way out of our stupid Marijuana War. There are countless other experiments that could be parceled out to states, as 'laboratories of democracy.')
Alas, such pragmatic treaties used to happen more often, back in those halcyon days when the Conference of Governors was a working group of 50 adults, instead of a conclave of posturing-partisan prima donnas. Today, the divide among states could not be more sharp. And not just as a matter of 'left-vs.-right dogma, but far more about competence versus incompetence and sane versus insane.
Take actual outcomes. Despite a few outliers, like Texas and Utah, most states that have deep-red governments -- governor and legislature -- have had gruesomely awful results, the last few decades. Those doing best among them, like Virginia and North Carolina, have been turning purple, fast. Those doing worst -- including the deep Confederate South and Kansas and Oklahoma -- are sinking fast. Meanwhile, pure-blue states along the coasts appear to be doing great, and not only where it comes to budget balancing and investing in people. Any libertarian-leaning person is a hypocrite, if he or she fails to notice which states are finally backing out of the loony-catastrophic so-called War on Drugs.
Which brings us full circle back the California's Governor Jerry Brown, whose fourth tenure in Sacramento is so successful, we all would have plotzed to have him be the Democratic Party nominee for President, in 2016, despite his age.
But okay, that's done. So why do I call him "president in exile"?
== Put it all together ==
We must face a harsh truth. We are currently in phase eight of the Civil War, a recurring national fever that has broken out in America ever since 1778. Washington is in confederate hands and -- as usual -- the Union is late responding, slow to anger and at a loss where to find its generals.
Well, until we can locate our ideal combination of Lincoln and T. Roosevelt and F. Roosevelt and Ike, we'll have to make do. And right now, blatantly, by every metric of population, success and delighted citizenry, there is one leader of Blue America, if only he would stand up to take the position he has earned.
Jerry Brown is -- de facto -- president in exile of what remains of the United States of America. Moreover, it is time to slap him into realizing it.Is the U.S. federal government being deliberately frozen and rendered impotent by (at best) fools or else (at-worst) traitors? Sure. Shall we just march and scream and tell jokes on late-night TV? Or might we use tools that are already in place?
Oh, sure, Jerry Brown cannot call an emergency meeting of the National Governor's Conference. A majority of the attendees would be Republican dogmatists who seem bent on dragging their states down a toilet swirl of cheating and failed ideology. There is a Democratic Governors Association -- a small group, chaired by CT Gov. Dan Malloy -- and it would be a start.
Sure, there are plenty of pragmatic matters generally on the agenda, when the governors of active, and not confederate, states meet. But I assert it is time for more than that. It's time for this group to make plain that they intend to provide a nucleus for action on behalf of the American Experiment. And yes -- if need be -- in that noble endeavor's defense.
Example #1 - the Affordable Care Act is not dead, yet. Nor would the House bill kill it completely. Blue States can step in, on a dozen issues. Foremost among these: All it will take to "save the ACA insurance markets" will be for these states to impose their own individual mandate penalty tax on young people who shirk buying insurance. Sure it's risky. But blue state youths are very solidly democratic. And if they were to join the insurance pool in large numbers, state-centered versions of the ACA won't "explode" as Trump raves that he wants them to. At least not in those states. And the contrast with places like Kansas will soar beyond anyone's ability to ignore.
But that's not today's main point. As I said at the beginning, what makes all this critical is a matter of safety and security.
Which brings us back to Friday's massive cyber attack. What can a dozen governors do about what is clearly a national and international problem?
Well, these blue states combined have the world's fourth biggest economy. They hold the world's greatest universities and research institutions and the most tech savvy populace. They provide most of the tax revenue that the rest of America utterly relies upon, as well as nearly all of the productivity and inventiveness. A point that could be made very clear if Jerry Brown went on TV and did the job that Donald Trump is supposedly there to do.
== Tell us to get clean! ==
Talk to computer security experts and they will tell you that most of our vulnerability today comes from both citizens and companies being lax about updating their security software. Millions of home and office computers are now suborned into participating in "botnets" or networks of surreptitiously connected machines, that criminals or foreign governments then use to transmit and amplify their attacks. For whatever the reason -- generally laziness -- those corporations and individual users cannot be bothered to do simple things that would prevent their machines from being taken over.
In legal terms, that is negligent-complicit participation in crime. And it is a cancer in our society, as we saw, last Friday. Moreover, the solution is obvious! Someone we trust - who has some authority - needs to go online and on TV to say:
"Those of you out there who have negligently allowed your computers to become hackable have opened opportunities for criminals and parasites to prey on others, and upon your communities, states and nation. I am not here to propose making that negligence a criminal offense. But I will now warn you that you can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse. Moreover, I am asking that state legislatures pass the following amendment to tort or civil law."If you take basic precautions, annually, to maintain your system's security updates and use any of a dozen state-measured, commercial anti-hacking programs, then that good faith effort will be enough to leave private individuals and most small businesses non-culpable for damages from future botnet attacks, even if their systems wind up being used in clever hacks that the security companies missed. Moreover, here are links to videos that will explain it all, and your options.
"But if you have not done basic security updates, and your system is used to infect others, then you will bear a proportionate share of the damages that eventually are awarded to victims of such crimes. Moreover, this responsibility will apply to any interests that out-of-state parties have in California, or any other member of our group of states."
There you have it. Just three paragraphs. And I promise you, the very next day millions of lazy people and companies would rush to update their systems and to run security programs! Within a week, many if not most of the botnets operating in America would be severely undermined, if not crippled. And tens of millions of Americans will be safer, by the way.
Why am I combining two topics today, by asking Jerry Brown to make this public statement? Isn't this a matter for the President of the United States, or some other high, national official?
Think about that question and answer it for yourself.
It's not just that we have a sabotaged and crippled national government, at-best incompetent and at-worst treasonous. It is that this matter cannot wait!
And yes, okay, I would also love to see Jerry do something nationally memorable. There is even a chance that Blue America -- which now includes every single fact-using profession -- might rally around him as an elder statesman who has no ambitions for 2020.
Well, well. It's a fantasy. Like the dream that was America. Like the palpably successful dream called California.
== Jerry's Evil Conterpart ==
That should suffice for today. But before we close, a note about someone who is just as smart... in service of evil.
Do I still call George F. Will "The Worst Man in America," when he applies his sharp pen to eviscerating Donald Trump? In this case, his diagnosis is acid:
"This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence."
Given how much I agree with Will's assessment of DT, might I retract my own aspersions aimed at George Will?
Consider them doubled. This brilliant wit dedicated his adult life to undermining the equally brilliant clades - from science and medicine to investigative journalism - that engendered most of our wealth, achievements and power. His rationalizations helped fuel the War on Science, now being waged against every fact-based profession. His scalpel pierced deepest, in the steady lobotomization of American conservatism.
In denouncing Trump, Mr. Will expresses outrage that an impudent upstart leapt into the saddle of confederate, anti-intellectual populism -- a rabid, frothing beast that the lords of the right thought to be their private steed... just as the Junkers Prussian nobility were appalled when a raving rider seized the reins of 1930s German rightwing populism. In both cases, the first victim was sensible, rational conservatism. The version of conservatism that Mr. Will claims to represent, but that he has systematically assassinated.
George Will's unctuous pleadings for oligarchy - and excuses for wealth disparity rivaling 1789 France - persuaded many of today's aristocratic morons to believe what their egos and sycophants told them. Despite history's lesson, they think that this time they'll do neo-feudalism right, by pounding the great American middle class that the Greatest Generation built, and by inciting populist rage against all the fact-using, "smartaleck elites" who stand in oligarchy's way.
Of course the only possible outcome from this lunatic-stupid oligarchic putsch is that they will wind up riding tumbrels.
Wait... is it possible that was George Will's intent, all along? As in that famous Tom Tomorrow cartoon? I never said he wasn't clever!
But no. This is why he is the Worst Man in America. Instinct nor reflex nor dullard rationalization made him do all this. He brought us here with open eyes. And now, his horrified denunciations of Trump are like Viktor Frankenstein screaming at his monster.
You did this. Deal with that fact. Then maybe we'll listen.
